Youth on Social Media: Duckfaces In Strange Places

There is a subset of digital natives who do not know life without social media and journalist Nancy Jo Sales has found them.

Sales’s Vanity Fairarticle “Friends Without Benefits” provides an in-depth look into how America’s youth are representing themselves on social media. In particular, she finds that social network sites (SNSs) and dating apps act as conduits for users to express themselves sexually. While this can be interpreted as liberating — as young people can now celebrate their bodies more freely online — in lived practice it only further endorses socially constructed definitions of gender. Namely, through Sales’s viewpoint, the ease in forming ties afforded by social media only increases the expectation for young girls to give sexual favors to any boy who asks and at the same time, are publicly shamed for doing so.

An interviewee, Emily, notes that there is a massive trend in selfies which were meant to look “sexy” while they made “the duck face and were all, like, 11.”

‘I think everyone does it,’ Greta said. ‘Everyone looks through other people’s profiles, but especially being teenage girls, we look at the profiles of the males we find attractive and we stalk the females the males find attractive.’

Therefore, in creating an environment where identity is largely based on “physical capital,” the ties that are formed tend to be sexual and ephemeral. Dating apps such as Tinder and Grindr support this type of “hook-up culture,” enabling young users to “swip[e] through pictures,” hearting or liking one another’s profiles to show interest. Ultimately, social media allows for young girls and boys to access a web of latent ties which promises sexual favors:

“A disembodied coupling that takes place solely on a screen [..] guys you know from just, like, having one class together will be like, ‘Do you like to suck dick?’ [..] And if you say no, they just move on to the next person.”

However, while the concern of social media usage by American youth is a real one, it is important to question: Exactly, whose lives is social media destroying? While particular stories in Sales’s article are able to resonate with me it is because I can identify with aspects of the narrow demographic of American youth that she identifies: the children of densely populated cities such as Los Angeles and New York. With the sample size of Sales’s research being neither large enough nor fully revealed, she omits those who are affected by the digital divide, as well as those who do not fit Steven McClaine‘s “digital default user”: white, heterosexual, affluent. It is important to acknowledge that if this article were to truly encapsulate the use of social media by young American users, it must delve into the various sub-communities that make up this category. Stories of online social media would look drastically different when framed in a different demographic of young users, such as the young black users that constitute Black Twitter or the Facebook usage of the Singaporean Gang Members interviewed by Sun Sun Lim.